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Narrow Minded

You don’t have to search very hard to find the excruciating online videos known as thinspiration, or thinspo. Photomontages of skeletal women, including some celebrities and models, play all over the Internet, uploaded from the United States, Germany, Holland and elsewhere. These videos are designed to “inspire” viewers — to fortify their ambitions. But exactly which ambitions? To lose weight, presumably. To stop losing weight, possibly. Thinspo videos profess a range of ideologies, often pressing morbid images into double service, as both goads and deterrents to anorexia.

Thinspiration videos are a cryptic art with rigid rules, as much a formula as a form. As listless, pounding or archly chipper music plays, still photos of one wraith after another surface and fade. The women are generally solitary and sullen, or entirely faceless. Bony self-portraits, created in bathroom mirrors by anonymous photographers, have faces that have been obscured or cropped out. Many figures in the videos are supine, as in the pervasive hipbone self-portrait, which seems to be shot by a photographer on her back aiming a camera at her abdomen and the waistband of her jeans. A bird’s-eye shot of the thighless legs of a seated figure is also common. The soundtracks to thinspiration videos, some of which feature songs explicitly about starvation, are not subtle. Skeleton, you are my friend. I will sacrifice all I have in life. Bones are beautiful. Hey, baby, can you bleed like me?

Filmmakers are reticent with commentary. If they explain their images in any way, it’s with oddly peppy title cards (“Enjoy!” “Thanks for watching!”) or a series of unsigned quotations, compiled as if for a commonplace book. A thinspiration auteur makes her voice heard almost exclusively through these cards, and she sometimes uses them to plead with her audience to go easy on her work or to stay tuned for further thinspo. I’ve never seen a thinspo video with a voice-over or even moving images.

Shooting photos just for a video is also rare. Instead, thinspiration consists of personal, archival and file photos (some taken from Photobucket and other photo-sharing sites) that have been inventively sequenced and edited, often using the so-called Ken Burns effect of pressing in on significant details. Focusing on shadows around the pelvises, ribs, knees and spines of underweight women, the most extreme thinspiration filmmakers eschew not just muscle and fat but seemingly all human tissue. The ghastly subgenre known as “bones thinspo” shows some bodies that must surely be corpses.

Like ballet and some forms of modern dance, thinspiration puts a premium on both agony and lightness. It also carries a fierce ethic of self-sacrifice. “Sacrifice,” many of the title cards instruct, “is giving up something good for something better.” A video by the prolific Chewing Cotton Productions flashes this quotation: “Time spent wasting is not wasted time.” There is also haunting poetry about a desire to be exempted from natural laws, including this passage, which appears with variations in several of the videos: “I want to be so thin, light, airy that, when the light hits me, I don’t leave a shadow behind. When I walk across the snow I will not leave so much as one footprint to mar its virgin purity. I can dance between the raindrops in a downpour.”

What should we make of this provocative, even chilling material? Like other kinds of photography involving young women, thinspiration is regarded by some as a moral outrage, even a public-health threat. (This response is much rarer when subjects and consumers of a form are men — as with pro-bodybuilding “bigspiration” videos.) Last month, the lower house of the French Parliament proposed outlawing any online incitement to anorexia, including thinspiration videos and some 400 Web sites that seem to advocate anorexia and bulimia with words and pictures. The bill’s sponsor, a lawmaker named Valérie Boyer, argued that “the sociocultural and media environment seems to favor the emergence of troubled nutritional behavior.”

From the looks of the thinspo images, “troubled nutritional behavior” seems like an understatement. Many of those who post comments about the videos are as horrified by them as Boyer is, and the debate over pro-anorexia material is nowhere more heated than in the YouTube comments section. “You are not only killing yourself but you are killing other girls as well,” wrote someone called artslave411 on a recent thinspiration video. Someone shot back: “As if some pictures could make you become an anorexic . . . All I want to say: Don’t think of pictures as that powerful!”

Photo

Credit
Photograph by Kevin Van Aelst

Government intervention in this debate seems futile. Leaving aside the fantasy of ever controlling the cultural climate — a force of nature that is no longer incorporated only in production studios, publishing companies, radio stations and television outlets — it’s not entirely clear that thinspiration should be considered “media” rather than a highly idiosyncratic response to it. This material presents itself as subversive and defiant, and thinspo collections are much closer to multimedia journal entries than they are to TV shows or fashion spreads in glossy magazines. What’s more, many thinspo sites make explicit their opposition to popular culture, approvingly offering images of women deemed “too skinny by media standards.”

On a formal level, thinspiration rejects the conventions of propaganda and advertising, instead borrowing devices from two other forms, one traditional and one digital. The traditional form is women’s confessional poems and diaries, including the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Louise Glück. A woman who is furtive, prolific, deeply melancholy, proud of her sacrifices, furious at her family’s various offenses, frustrated with her body and protective of her supreme right to destroy herself — this persona, in America, at least, was the invention of poets like Plath, whose teasing and savage voice, even now, is every bit as bracing as the thinspo videos. The cacophony of female archetypes in Plath’s work — little girl (“Daddy, daddy”), avenging Cassandra (“Do I terrify?”) and wan martyr (“the long gone darlings”) — turn up in the thinspiration videos, too, which feature women looking alternately like schoolgirls, madwomen and saints. Sarcasm and assonance characterize thinspo poetry: “Eat no evil.”

The second influence, from digital culture, is the so-called recuts: videos that take existing photography and film and use music and new juxtapositions to create a story that’s at odds with a master narrative. (An example: the fictional trailers that tease out a gay, “Brokeback Mountain” plot from virtually every mainstream blockbuster.) Film of runway shows, as it appears on fashion Web sites, presents the models as confident, beautiful, “fierce,” where the same roll, in the hands of a thinspo filmmaker, can make them look disfigured and diseased.

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Setting aside the mystifying proposition that anorexia be seen as a lifestyle choice (as some extremist pro-anorexia sites maintain), as well as the age-old riddle of whether popular culture can produce mental illness, what seems most significant about the thinspiration videos is that they’re not propaganda or even entertainment, but an effort, however misguided, at art. One thinspiration filmmaker whose YouTube screen name is “hungryhell,” and who spoke on condition of anonymity to keep her struggles with bulimia private from people who know her, emphasized to me in an e-mail message that her work “represents what I have been feeling at that time in particular.” She added, “The songs I use . . . say exactly what I need to but can’t figure out how.”

Hungryhell’s films are intricate, many of them augmenting the thinspo formula with collage, typography, still lifes, art photography and even painting. I asked her how she does it. “Putting it together is not hard,” she wrote back, explaining that she uses Windows Movie Maker software. “When I am feeling something, it just all comes together.”

LAZY LAZARUS: Like Jim Morrison, Gene Roddenberry and Richard Feynman, Sylvia Plath is one of those pre-Internet cult figures whom Web communities have rallied around posthumously. The German-run site sylviaplath.de is among the most conscientious. A nicely done fan site with dozens of photos can be found at sylviaplath.info.

BODIES IN PAINT: When Lucian Freud’s breathtaking painting ‘‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’’ sold for a record $33.6 million at auction this month, viewers were reminded of his view of the wonderfully ungovernable human form. Freud’s nudes are a challenge to the eyes and soul; rise to the challenge at moma.org/exhibitions/2007/freud.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Narrow Minded. Today's Paper|Subscribe